The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

In present-day America, it is said that young people have little interest in their ancestry. They see their choice of life partner as a personal matter entirely. As to marrying outside the circle of their origins, most would have no hesitation.

That may be less true in Europe, where the past has cut deeper grooves in ancient cities and emotional cartography.

Speaking of the past and the claims it may put on us, I am just now reading What the Wind Knows, a historical romance by a writer named Amy Harmon. The book’s heroine is Anne, a young American woman who travels to Ireland to carry out the last wish of her grandfather: that she scatter his ashes in the county of his birth.

Faithfully, Anne does the requested scattering on a lake in her grandfather’s county. Afterward, drifting in the rowboat, she is overtaken by the mood of reverie evoked by the whole setting, the sad obligation she’s just met, and yearning recollections of the grandfather whose stories imprinted her youth. Meanwhile, a fog has settled over the lake, enveloping her so that she can no longer see how far from shore she may have drifted. When at last another boat comes into view, she calls out to those rowers for directions. To her surprise, the men in the boat point a rifle her way and open fire. When one bullet hits her, she topples into the lake. Once retrieved and rescued, Anne finds herself in the Ireland of 1921!

She falls in love with a young doctor whose worn gravestone she has recently seen as an American visitor fulfilling the familial duty of her 21st-century life. Having the same name, she is assumed to be the missing widow of a fallen Irish patriot. Can she tell the man she now loves who she really is? Having previously read about the Irish struggle for independence from the British crown, there are terrible events that Anne knows will happen, though they have not happened yet. Can she warn people, without raising suspicions?

A story like that makes excruciating demands on the writer’s craft, but Amy Harmon meets them in full. She’s very good.

Bodice busters – as this genre of romance novels got called in the publishing trade – aren’t generally taken seriously. At least not by urbane readers and literary critics. They’re seen as catering to the tastes of women and – believe me – that’s not a compliment.

The critics and fashion-mongers of good taste are mistaken. In reality, romances are interesting because they take True Love to be among the facts of life. In this, they are correct. Then the romance novels go on to show how the immemorial fact of true love may be shaped by the permissions or prohibitions of earlier times. How would romantic love work its will in Tudor times or in Viking times? What barriers might those lovers have to meet? By what means might their obstacles be overcome? The best authors do a fair amount of research as background for their tales.

The advantage of romance novels is that their defining problematics aren’t set out as dry thought experiments. Instead, vicariously we get to live them through – the fresh sweat still glistening on the actors who stand in for ourselves.

In my high school days, I used to pass hours in the Renaissance rooms, and sometimes the Egyptian rooms, or the eighteenth-century rooms of New York’s Metropolitan Museum. With all the imaginative longing I could muster, I would try to feel what it must have been like to live in those past centuries.

Is time travel a real possibility? Is “far memory” (of times we lived previously) a delusion or the hint of an actual experience? 

I remember the first time I flew to Israel. As the El Al plane circled lower to land, I looked down at a country that, supposedly, I had never seen before. Unbidden, the words that came into my mind were these:

There it is again.

How nice!

They’ve put cities down this time!

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